02 — Toolkit

R, the shell, git, and make.

Lecturer

Julian Hinz

Date

March 1, 2026

Tools.

This module covers the core toolkit: R programming, the Unix shell, version control with git, and build automation with make.

Lecture slides

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Further resources

Shell

Start here:

  • Software Carpentry’s The Unix Shell — step-by-step lesson designed for researchers with no prior shell experience
  • The Unix Workbench by Sean Kross — beginner-friendly book with exercises

Go deeper:

R

Start here:

  • Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund’s R for Data Science — the gold standard; start with chapters 1–4
  • Grant McDermott’s R basics — economics-flavored companion
  • R for Economic Research 2nd ed. (2025): book.rleripio.com — applied reference aimed at economists

Go deeper:

  • Introduction to data.table — vignette for the fast data manipulation package central to Module 03
  • Advanced R by Hadley Wickham — deep dive into R internals (environments, metaprogramming); not needed for this course, but valuable if you want to understand how R works under the hood

Make and build automation

  • Karl Broman’s minimal make tutorial — the right starting point
  • MIT’s “The Missing Semester”: Metaprogramming — covers Make, dependency management, and build systems in more depth
  • targets package — the R-native alternative to Make with dependency tracking, caching, and parallel execution built in

Quarto

  • Quarto: Get Started — official tutorial; Quarto is used throughout this course for assignments and reports
  • Quarto guide — full documentation for authoring, cross-references, citations, and output formats

Git

See Module 01 resources for a full list of Git references. Key picks: